Tim Fernholz

Critiques of Obama’s performance at Saddleback are coming in fast and furious, and most of them are negative. But I’d ignore those and instead go with Noam Scheiber’s take, and this one. Nobody expected the evangelicals at this forum to declare themselves fervent Democrats after Obama’s Q & A. Instead he sought, and I think […]

A big, incoherent piece in the Times over the weekend almost, but not quite, shows how McCain’s foreign policy is crazy. Immediately after 9/11, McCain went around telling everyone that “this is war,” and by October 2001 he had picked Iraq as the only way top stop Al Qaeda, making his case for invasion six […]

Andrew Sullivan writes that, “Since Obama’s hubris in Berlin, he has lost almost every cycle of this campaign, and lost all of them quite badly. I’m not sure his campaign gets how far they have sunk, and how ineffectual and passive Obama has seemed these past few weeks.” Setting aside the Berlin thing — why, […]

Brad Plumer has a smart piece about what the price of oil will do to air travel, one of the hardest sectors to switch over to renewable fuels. Plumer identifies a whole host of potential consequences, cultural and economic, of future increases in the cost of air travel, from the dangers faced by cities who […]

When Adam posted this the other day, we were wondering whether any mainstream outlets would recognize the fact that John McCain is conducting his own foreign policy by frequently advising Saakashvili and sending his own delegation to Georgia. Not only that, but his policy is frequently at odds with that of the actual president’s administration. […]

I think Rob mistakes my point, or I didn’t make it effectively. Of course democracies do go to war — even in the 21st century! — but it’s how they get there that is important in this case. The Russo-Georgian war (are we calling it that yet?) was a huge shock because many international observers […]

Spencer is right that the underlying cause of this conflict has little to do with the type of government in either Russia or Georgia, but the fact that Russia is autocratic has everything to do with the mechanics of the conflict. Would Russia have pursued a military conflict there if they had a real opposition […]

Despite the puritanical anti-sports chat policy of TAPPED’s editors, this Harvey Araton column is relevant to geopolitics, too! It deals with the Chinese Women’s Gymnastics Team and the controversy surrounding their ages; you must be 16 to compete in the Olympics but documents suggest some of the Chinese team is 14. One former Chinese athlete […]

Here’s the definitive early morning collection of the latest in D.C. wonktivity, from China to Iraq with a little bit of domestic chat in between. Bon appetit! The China Syndrome. Everybody’s heard how China has been cleaning up in anticipation of the Olympics. There’s increased security, more (but not total) freedom to surf the web […]

There’s an article at Politico enumerating why Obama supporters should be worried. Some of the reasons to worry are accurate (race issues, Virginia, and Michigan are all X-factors) and some are silly (the fact that Dems have only elected Southern governors to be President in the last half-century, there’s no third party challenger, people may […]